http://www.lenholgate.com/ Len Holgate's thoughts on this and that... Mainly test driven software development in C++ on Windows platforms... - Geek Speak en-us Len.Holgate@JetByte.com 2009-12-24T09:07:49+00:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000888.html I've complained about DevPartner Studio enough in the past (here, here, here, etc.) that I thought I should write a positive blog posting since my recent experiences have been very positive. Some time ago I reported a bug in the... Posted by Len at 09:07 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 888@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-12-24T09:07:49+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000885.html I've been spending a little time recently writing a custom Wireshark dissector plugin for the UDT protocol. This didn't prove to be that difficult once I got over the initial problem of actually getting the Wireshark source to build with... Posted by Len at 12:05 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Socket Servers ]]> 885@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-11-26T12:05:06+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000874.html I'm building my managed XLL tool in two versions, a 'normal user' version and a 'pro' version. The 'pro' version has additional features that I don't feel would necessarily appeal to all of my potential users; things such as easy... Posted by Len at 04:18 PM | Comments (2) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 874@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-10-01T16:18:37+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000872.html Has anyone got anything to say about the relative merits of Parasoft Insure++ vs the BoundsChecker parts of the Microfocus DevPartner Studio product? I've used BoundsChecker for a long time, and it has plenty of faults but the fact that... Posted by Len at 03:17 PM | Comments (1) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 872@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-09-08T15:17:26+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000869.html I upgraded one of my build machines to Windows 7 almost a month ago now but I only managed to get around to doing my main developer machine at the start of this week. Apart from the fact that the... Posted by Len at 05:58 PM | Comments (7) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 869@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-09-04T17:58:47+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000868.html By an interesting coincidence I happened to be searching for a few new C++ blogs to follow and I also happened to have just updated this entry about Stan Lippman's VC6 rant (since I found a link to the original... Posted by Len at 12:12 PM | Comments (2) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 868@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-09-04T12:12:22+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000864.html Back in October 2005 some of my clients started to complain that the latest version of the Platform SDK (the April 2005 version) broke their builds. The culprit was uuid.lib which had been built with debugging information that the VC6... Posted by Len at 08:49 AM | Comments (4) | Categories: Geek Speak , Rants ]]> 864@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Rants 2009-08-11T08:49:55+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000863.html Since I complained about how the Microsoft File Transfer Manager sucked when I was downloading the Windows 7 Beta back in March I thought I should be balanced and point out that last night I kicked off a download of... Posted by Len at 10:53 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 863@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-08-07T10:53:06+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000859.html I'm fairly set in my ways about the value (or lack of) of comments in C++ code. I tend to have very few comments in my code and I tend to favour names and structure over comments; names and structure... Posted by Len at 01:19 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 859@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-07-28T13:19:20+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000858.html Jamie Fristrom over at GameDevBlog thinks that "Globals are underrated". I disagree, and, agree with most of the comments that Noel makes; globals and their 90's equivalent, singletons, are evil. As anyone who has looked at the code that I... Posted by Len at 01:08 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 858@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-07-28T13:08:40+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000849.html Eric Lippert has an interesting blog posting (here) on how sometimes you can be so focused on fixing the bug you fail to step back and take a better look at the actual problem that you're trying to solve. I'm... Posted by Len at 09:25 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 849@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-06-03T09:25:18+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000846.html I've just spent a little too long trying to track down a bug in a mixed mode DLL that I'm building. The DLL exposes a set of entry point functions that are defined as taking a single pointer argument and... Posted by Len at 06:19 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 846@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-05-14T18:19:44+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000845.html I'm currently wrapping a server's client side API in an ATL COM object for a client. The COM object will be used to communicate with the server from managed code or VB or other COM compatible systems. It's a fairly... Posted by Len at 09:50 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 845@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-05-12T09:50:29+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000844.html Well, I've finally done something that I've been meaning to do for a long time. I've written some non-trivial assembly language code. Up until recently I wasn't expecting this to be embedded assembly, but it actually seems like a sensible... Posted by Len at 07:50 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 844@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-05-08T07:50:30+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000842.html I'm in the process of upgrading another client to v6.0. These guys write multi-user game systems and have a fairly complex CLR hosting custom application server. Anyway, I was hoping that we'd have a few easy performance wins from the... Posted by Len at 01:16 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Socket Servers ]]> 842@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-04-28T13:16:48+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000841.html Herb Sutter has just published an interesting article over at DDJ on correctly using thread pools: Use Thread Pools Correctly: Keep Tasks Short and Nonblocking. It's not rocket science and it doesn't deal with platform issues but it's a useful... Posted by Len at 08:48 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Socket Servers ]]> 841@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-04-21T08:48:50+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000828.html Something that I find myself wanting in a debugger from time to time are breakpoints that only fire if the code has been entered via a specific route. You know the problem, you've tracked a particular issue down to one... Posted by Len at 09:43 AM | Comments (1) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 828@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-01-22T09:43:42+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000827.html It's now around a month since I started shifting the bulk of my source code from CVS to Subversion. In that time I've move most of my internal use code, and a couple of clients. I've done several client releases... Posted by Len at 09:27 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 827@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-01-15T09:27:14+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000824.html Converting a numeric type to a string format in C++ is one of those problems that was 'solved' a long time ago. The 'standard' method usually involves streaming the type to be converted into a std::stringstream and then extracting the... Posted by Len at 09:17 PM | Comments (4) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 824@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-12-19T21:17:11+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000823.html The CVS to SVN code migration is going well. As recommended by a commenter I've switched from using a script to pull my tools libraries from their repository into the server framework examples build tree to using svn:externals. This works... Posted by Len at 09:40 AM | Comments (2) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 823@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-12-18T09:40:00+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000822.html I'm in the process of moving my source code from a CVS repository to Subversion. The main reason for the move is so that I can move the repository onto one of my NAS devices so that it can be... Posted by Len at 01:23 PM | Comments (10) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 822@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-12-11T13:23:27+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000819.html The move to the new hosting server is complete and all the perl config has been done so I've turned comments back on!... Posted by Len at 09:31 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 819@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-12-02T21:31:08+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000817.html I've just updated my installation of DevPartner Studio. I mainly use the C++ error detection part of this suite, that's the bit that used to be called BoundsChecker. Anyway, version 9.0 is the first version to support VS2008 and x64... Posted by Len at 07:23 AM | Comments (8) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 817@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-11-22T07:23:55+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000815.html I've been compiling with /W4 for some time now. I didn't realise that this wasn't the best you could get. There are some warnings which are not enabled by default and therefore aren't included in /W4. To enable these you... Posted by Len at 10:25 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 815@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-10-19T22:25:58+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000812.html I've been meaning to build STLPort for Visual Studio 2008 for some time now but as the STL support that ships with Visual Studio has been improved the urgency to be able to use an alternative has reduced. Unfortunately STLPort... Posted by Len at 11:06 AM | Comments (1) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 812@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-10-01T11:06:05+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000808.html I'm currently writing and testing a simple class that watches for system time changes. This is to allow an app to adjust some timers that it sets for absolute times in the future if the system time changes. The code's... Posted by Len at 06:05 PM | Comments (3) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 808@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-09-09T18:05:03+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000801.html There's an interesting article over on Dr. Dobb's about why writing lock free code is so hard. Herb Sutter takes some code from an article that Dr. Dobb's published a couple of months ago and pulls it apart and points... Posted by Len at 12:06 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 801@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-08-06T12:06:50+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000793.html I stumbled on Gustavo Duarte's blog this week via this post about how lucky we are to be programmers. The post that led me to his blog is good stuff and has had lots of linkage this week. The rest... Posted by Len at 09:52 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 793@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-07-24T21:52:52+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000781.html I found JP's blog whilst googling for some information on RVA forwarders in PE files. There's lots of good stuff there about reasonably low level Windows development, debugging, testing and API hooking. Recommended if you like the kind of stuff... Posted by Len at 12:30 PM | Comments (1) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 781@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-05-06T12:30:51+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000780.html Back in October 2007 I sumarised my findings from getting my Win32 DebugAPI based debug engine working on x64. One of the strange things that I found at the time was this: When running a CLR app under the Win32... Posted by Len at 04:43 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Geek Speak , Testing ]]> 780@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-05-01T16:43:42+00:00